Great news for the many of us with Swedish ancestors in Minnesota, ArkivDigital announced that it has begun the process of digitizing many of the Swedish-American church records in Minnesota. They tell us that the records should begin to be available soon. This follows the wonderful job they did with the church records of Kansas. Further reason why I believe ArkivDigital is the must have resource for genealogist with Swedish (and Swedish-American) ancestors!
Blog
Free Nordic Genealogy Webinars
I wanted to remind everyone that FamilySearch has some great free webinars on Scandinavian research. Some of the webinars are pre-recorded (they can be found in the Learning Center-But note, they have recently “upgraded” their Learning Center and its search functionality does not work very well and there does not appear to be a browse by Country capability.) Others webinars are in real-time which allows you the opportunity to ask questions of the instructor. For example, over the next two months FamilySearch is offering four live webinars:
- Tue, 9 May, 11:00 AM MDT, Norwegian Emigration: The Experience
- Wed, 24 May, 2:00 PM MDT, Databases for Swedish Genealogy
- Tue, 13 Jun, 1:00 PM MDT, How to Find Ancestors in the Digitalarkivet
- Wed, 28 Jun, 11:00 AM MDT, Introducing Danish Probates
New webinars are posted monthly, and can be found here. I highly recommend these webinars: they are from some of the top people in the field!
Sweden’s National Archives For FREE?
There has been an increasing push to make the digital resources from the Swedish Riksarkivet (National Archives) freely available, rather than available only with a subscription. Last month the Government asked the Riksarkivet to prepare a report on the issues around such a change. This would be a dramatic change for Sweden, but it falls in line with the approach taken in Denmark and Norway, where the digital resources are free. And certainly, I would not mind saving over $100 a year in subscription fees. Note that, while many of the records are available through ArkivDigital-and in better quality digitizations-many records are not available.
Hello! Hej! Hallo! Hei!
Welcome to my blog! The purpose of this blog is to pass on news on the field of Scandinavian and German Genealogy, and to present tricks and tips to make you a better genealogist.